Tech and Research Update: April
Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the field of decentralized web software protocols. One way the foundation does this is through its Research and Technical teams. We’ve collected the most recent updates from all members of the teams so you can know what we’ve been up to!
Bruno Škvorc here — technical educator at W3F and paperboy for April!
Grab your morning cup (even if it’s afternoon), put your feet in the air, and read up on everything we’ve been doing in the Foundation’s secret lair 👀
👨🎓 Research
- Alistair, Handan, and Syed have cross-checked the code with the designs of GRANDPA and BABE, where only small discrepancies were found that are being addressed now. Alfonso is cross-checking NPoS currently. In other words, the current code and current research are being synchronized to match.
- Alfonso and Alistair prepared the first draft of the NPoS paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12990. Have a look!
- The Availability and Validity (AnV) protocol specification will be shortly ready.
- The Polkadot overview paper is ready and will be released with an announcement in the coming days!
📖 Technical Education
- The technical education team continues to aggressively hammer out wiki issues — we’re keeping the content fresh, relevant, and clear. As always, we encourage you to help us with this — report issues or contribute — we’ve got this spiffy pink ribbon up there just for you!
- The technical education team has started producing short-form videos, quick explainers on some FAQs or interesting topics from the Web3, Kusama, Polkadot or Substrate ecosystem. Check them out in this playlist or pick from the list:
- A Walkthrough of Polkadot’s UI
- Why be a validator on Polkadot or Kusama
- Why be a nominator on Polkadot or Kusama
- How Bitcoin and Ethereum can cooperate through Polkadot
- How to Update a Substrate Node
- TODO when we upload the rest
- We’re doing some additional community building on the technical outreach part. You can now keep up with Web3 content on Quora, in the Dotleap newsletter, and, well, on Rizzle…
- The 1000 validators program is alive and kicking with some 32 active members. Join here if you’d like to validate on Kusama but don’t have the capital to prop yourself up!
- The MOOC by tech ed lead Bill Laboon has launched and already has 3 lessons out. Check it out if you’d like free knowledge about the fundamentals of blockchains!
- In collaboration with Ava.do, we helped people set up their own full nodes for Kusama. This resulted in a pool of public nodes that can now be connected to through a load balancer — basically letting you connect to people’s home-run nodes. More info in this wiki page. Fun fact: the related #sendNodes contest resulted in a whopping 80+ new full nodes in the network across more than 800 participants!
- Logan created pallet-swaps, a version of Uniswap on Substrate. Not production-worthy but a very interesting proof of concept!
Crowdcasts
- I hosted a crowdcast showing how to configure Prometheus and Grafana for your node.
- I also hosted one on the difference between full nodes, archive nodes, and light nodes and how to run a full node
- Continuing that, Anson and Logan hosted a crowdcast on configuring a sentry node for your validator.
💽 DevOps
The devops team has been involved on several major deployments during this month, including the rollout of Kusama RPC endpoints for China and the migration of 60% of W3F validators to different regions.
They also continued working on the testing framework for Polkadot networks they started a few months ago. An initial version will be released in the coming weeks. As part of this effort they have open sourced several components of the project, mainly typescript libraries and terraform modules.
In collaboration with the research team, the devops team has released a framework for running Substrate benchmarks on different machines and publishing the results automatically.
Finally, they have been working on the last preparations for Polkadot launch and all is ready for creating bootnodes and PoA validators.
For more information about Web3 Foundation, check web3.foundation. If you want to follow more real-time updates out of our team follow @bitfalls, @BillLaboon and @logansaether. For a deeper dive into Polkadot, check our Wiki, which we are constantly updating and elaborating. We’re preparing some other platforms on which you can join us, stay tuned!
